


Hibernation (In the Ice Remix)

by navaan



Category: Iron Man Noir, Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Captain America/Iron Man Remix Madness 2017, Gen or Pre-Slash, Hypothermia, M/M, Remix, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-09-26 09:05:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9878534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: On his last mission Iron Man went down over a plane of ice and snow.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kiyaar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Oubliette](https://archiveofourown.org/works/560984) by [Kiyaar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/pseuds/Kiyaar). 
  * In response to a prompt by [Kiyaar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/pseuds/Kiyaar) in the [Cap_Ironman_Remix_Madness_2017](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Cap_Ironman_Remix_Madness_2017) collection. 



When the armor goes down, he is still awake. But at this point he can do nothing to catch himself, can only flounder and hope for the best as he is catapulted towards the place of snow and ice and endless white. He tries to get a final good-bye out to Pepper, thinks he hears her voice for less than a second, before it's drowned out. It was the crash that took it out of him, as the metal impacts and screeches pitifully as it's boring into the ice.

Faintly he hears the bomb detonating and the ice shudders and moves around him.

He will die here.

It's his choice that led him here and he has always known that only the sacrifice play would safe his home.

He regrets that Jim and Pepper will have to tell Jarvis. But it's better this way. This is the final trick he's playing on Hydra. Now the won't ever catch him alive, again, and there is nothing they can pull from his dead brain.

He goes under, aware of the armor's low warning as the ice ripples around him and he slides in deeper.

His thoughts stray to the last time he met Strucker - disfigured and limping from the wounds Tony had left him with - and remembers the cold touch of the needle and the burning fire in his veins when the formula went in. He escaped it, thanks to Erskine and his cure, but Hydra would always come after him. He is part Zemo now and will forever carry the spark of it, the fear of it inside of him. Compared to that the darkness is oblivion and he embraces it.

* * *

He becomes aware of water rushing up around him and thinks it will be his salvation. The armor can filter oxygen from water. Through countless underwater adventures it has become a necessity to look into better ways and it helped during flying too.

This will buy him time.

He tries to send out a call. “This is Iron Man... This is Tony Stark. The armor went down. Need immediate assistance. My location...” 

With a pang of fear he realizes he has no idea. He knows his last location before the crash and babbles something about it, but talking is becoming hard.

The armor is cooling down.

The water around it must be freezing cold and it's reserving power. Circuits must be smashed. He tries to flexes his fingers and finds it hard to move them.

He is shivering, but doesn't know when it started.

Temperature is falling.

Around him is only darkness.

It will be alright though. It always is in the end.

They know where he went down. They know where to look for him.

Someone is already on the way... He won't freeze to death.

* * *

He drifts, breathing shallow. Perhaps he fell asleep, but he isn't sure. His only thought is that sleep in this cold is dangerous. He knows the drill.

So he tries to hold on.

The feeling in his fingers is the first to go though and his nose feels terribly frozen.

He can't keep track of time and keeps a channel open in hopes of hearing from Pepper or Jim or anyone. But nothing happens.

At least if he just falls asleep, Iron Man will be his last resting place. It's a fitting end to a long adventure that was his life.

* * *

His mind is running, jumping from thought to thought, fantasy to fantasy.

His dreams come back to the Zemo formula and Erskine's cure and he curses the laters' insistence on shooting him up with at least one round of vita rays. He lives and lives and goes on living. He's hungry. His throat is dry. But all he can do is breath in and out, in and out until it suddenly doesn't matter anymore.

Perhaps he never falls asleep, perhaps he never breathes. He can't even say when he has tried moving for the last time. The cold has seeped into his bones and the immobilization is perhaps more scary than the thought of the ice he's buried in.

Perhaps.

The darkness scares him.

The inability to work his own way out of this. Waiting for someone else to work it out is not in his nature.

But there is nothing he can do.

* * *

Nobody comes.

His body is eaten up by a terrible burning. What can still feel tingles painfully and he can't even move to do anything about it. Even the armor's joints are frozen solid, but it doesn't matter. His arms and feet and limbs have gone dead.

After he screams, he sleeps.

He listens.

And dreams.

He is not afraid to be alone, just forgotten.

He will hold on as long as he can.

Someone will find him.

* * *

Expeditions to the coldest places on earth have never scared him. The adventures had never left time to really feel the cold. This time he feels every painful speck of it, even though he thinks, he shouldn't be able too at all.

Sometimes people talk, flickers of sound transported in through Iron Man's communication arrays. They are still working, still taking power from his now orichalcum powered heart.

He asks himself when that will run out. He hopes soon.

* * *

His body is failing him, he thinks, as he hangs in the darkness. He hears strange music, hears about wars he'll never fight.

He takes in impossible information like a sponge.

Why isn't he dead yer?

Why can't he just die?

* * *

He's turning into stone, into a golem, a true man of iron.

He swears his heart has stopped beating.

Sleep catches him in welcoming arms.

* * *

He hears the world sometimes and always feels the cold. Always.

He dreams of arctic expeditions and mountains with snow covered tops and of dying, finally, finally dying so he could finally stop feeling the cold.

* * *

The world never hears him, although he speaks at it in his dreams sometimes. He hears of wars he never fights in and of the world moving on. He listens whenever someone talks about technology and scientific advancements and what he hears about he dreams of.

* * *

Music is playing, songs and sounds he's never heard before, and he wonders in a fuzzy dream like state if Pepper will ever come to find him. He has lost all connection to time. He barely remembers a time when movement had been a constant in his life, when survival had counted on quick legs and fast reactions.

Life is only this: unmoving, dark and cold.

 _Someone will find me_ , he thinks and doubts and thinks that once he was able to cry.

* * *

The light penetrates his dreaming state.

It's glaring and he doesn't remember what light means.

Not darkness.

* * *

Death and dreams and darkness have been his existence.

The warmth... The sudden warmth is a shock, even though it doesn't yet penetrate the cold. The armor is his only hold, his heart suddenly giving a painful lurch as it starts beating.

 _Alive,_ a thought comes in a voice not his own. He startles, tries to open his eyes, but has forgotten how too.

 _Need him out of there_ , another thought comes in a different voice.

He still can't figure out to open his eyes.

The sound of metal parts moving hurt, hurts so bad. He realizes he hasn't heard anything like it in a long time, just the damped sounds of water an cracking ice and sometimes bits and pieces of scratchy voices coming from far, far away.

The mask is lifted.

He can't open the ice.

Heat makes his body tingle. Pain makes him gasp and only the sound inside of himself, resonating painfully, makes him realize that he hasn't heard his own voice in longer than he can remember.

It feels like the Zemo formula, and worse than the antidote still coursing through his veins. Hysteric laughter wants to break free, but he has forgotten how to make a sound. _Will keep you running for a hundred years, that heart,_ someone had said. Strucker, maybe.

Someone leans over him. It's a man. Broad shoulders. Blue mask. 

Masks are never a good thing.

“It's going to be alright, Mr. Stark,” he says, but his voice is so loud, so loud in Tony's ears.

Masks.

 _Hydra_ , he thinks. _Aren't they green?_

A woman calls out as Tony tries to move, tries to push away his captors. _Not Pepper._ Hands like iron bars press him down. Another man is there. Blond hair and... Something about him seems to bring up tattered memories of a story, a treasure maybe, legends. He and blue mask hold him.

A syringe comes into view.

His body just now catches up with the pain and the heat and the lingering cold and the fear, realizes it is alive. And being alive means life can be taken away.

Thoughts run much too fast. 

Colorful mask.

He could swear the woman hovering above him is the size of his thumb.

Experiments.

Hydra.

The syringe. 

Maybe he is trying to scream, but no words form, only those staccato gasping noises gurgle out of him. It's a new nightmare. He wishes for the darkness. A man in a red uniform and mask is holding the syringe and thoughts are racing, chasing each other until the cold still meets even colder flesh and Tony wants to scream but can't, feels hot strong hands like vises keep him down, but does not feel the pain of bruises only the tingling hot pain of heating flesh and it's terrible. 

“We are going to take care of you,” someone says and he looks up at blue eyes behind a blue mask, calm face. He's reminded of Erskine having him strapped to a table before he could shoot him up with the antidote. Something about the calm. Something about the compassion...

He goes under.

* * *

Someone reads to him in a steady stream of words. There is no static and no silence in between.

He thinks he knows the story, catches names here and there: Pepper, Jim, Jarvis and Tony.

Is that him?

Has it ever been?

* * *

_Maybe his mind is gone?_ The voice is just a whisper.

_Give it more time, Hank. He got a shot of an early serum back in the day._

_He's been dead for decades._

He feels like it.

* * *

The voice doesn't stop reading.

Only sometimes when the story turns to arguments or hushed conversations.

 _Catatonic_. He catches the word and thinks it might be time to pry open his eyes again.

But on the other side of the shivering and sweat waits Zemo and he does never want to let him out.

The shivering intensifies. Stories turn to whispers and a hand is pressed to his forehead. Firm touch. But soft. He drifts. Drifts. Like in the ice. Wakes. Drifts. Wakes again. A weight has settled at this side of his bed and the touch is still there.

Someone takes his hand.

“I'd love to meet you,” the reading voice says. “I've heard so much about you and never thought I'd get the chance. Now this is unfair.”

He opens his eyes. The light still hurts. 

Blue eyes.

He's not tied down.

“Hi?” the man asks with the steady voice he's gotten used to.

“Where...” Tony tries, not sure that is what he wants to know, but his voice is a raspy, croaking, garbelled mess of a noise and he coughs hard.

Fingers lace with his more firmly and the man leans further down to get a good look at him. “Welcome back, Iron Man,” he says and smiles. 

Tony remembers the name, but nobody ever called him that outside of call-signs.

“I'm Captain America,” the man says. “You can call me Steve.”

He opens and closes his mouth, not sure he can really form words yet. But he squeezes the man's strong fingers.

“You'll have a lot to catch up with,” he says and looks nervous. “Get your strength back first.”

He breathes. It's a good feeling. 

“I should go and fetch Hank, so he can make sure you're okay...” Steve tries to get up. 

Tony holds on to his hand.

He shivers. Remembers the loneliness. The dark and cold.

Saying “stay” is too much. 

“Alright,” Steve says and sinks back, his eyes soft. He holds up a book and Tony has never seen the cover. It looks like an awful piece of art to him. He recognizes the name Tony Stark and “Collected Adventures from Marvels”. 

“Slept,” he tries and it sounds terrible, “for... long time.” His voice croaks and vanishes.

Steve seems to understand and squeezes his hand. “Now you're awake.”

He tries to smile, but doesn't remember how. 

Steve starts reading, reads to him until he drifts off.

He's warm and not shivering, the sun falls on his face.

The nightmare has given way to a dream.


End file.
